Without much feeling I listened all week (well, let's say, most of the week) to Jimi Hendrix's Valleys of Neptune (2010). A coworker loaned it to me with the forewarning that there wasn't much there.
My first reaction was that Eddie Kramer decided to remix with an "adult contemporary" sheen some of the old tapes. Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding are present, but there is little of the gigantic propulsive sound that was the hallmark of The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
My parents owned a copy of Smash Hits (1969). They purchased it on its initial release. It was the only record that could turn me, a small boy, into a violent maniac. By the time the album had spun around to track 9, "Manic Depression," I was blissfully punching and kicking my older sisters. I loved it. It was a powerful drug for a little kid.
What we have, really, in The Jimi Hendrix Experience is the first Punk band. Yes, The Yardbirds and The Who and Velvet Underground should be mentioned, as well as The Rolling Stones, I suppose, but none had the sonic full spectrum dominance of The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Sadly, that sound is not to be encountered in Valleys of Neptune. There is some wonderful blues guitar noodling, for instance on "Red House," but nothing that is going to make you want to hop up and down and start kicking and punching.
The intention this week, the week of the city council primaries in Seattle, was to devote the Friday morning "Hippies vs. Punks" to post-Grunge, post-rock band Red Stars Theory whose heyday was the Emerald City of the mid- to late-1990s.
The untold story of Hippies vs. Punks is all the posts that have gone unwritten and unpublished. For instance, I've been ruminating on a post devoted to Big Star's #1 Record (1972) for more than a year. Another example -- I spent an entire work week listening to Carly Simon's 1971 eponymous debut; the record was produced by Jimi Hendrix's sound engineer Eddie Kramer at Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios at the time of Hendrix's death and had a connection to another post, the one on Zephyr's Going Back to Colorado.
But, as is the case with this week, by the time Friday rolls around there is too little fuel in the tank to do anyone or anything justice. This week was a rough one since I had to get into work an hour early to train my replacement. Yesterday was my last day. Goodbyes can be particularly enervating.
So Red Stars Theory will have to wait for another day. The post was going to dwell on the fading mists of Bohemia in the Emerald City of Clintontime 1990s, a time when Hippie houses were still visible in neighborhoods as well as independent Hippie bookstores and Punk coffee shops. After the millennium that all pretty much got wiped out as Seattle assumed its place as a West Coast digital Mecca.
Walking home yesterday after my bon voyage at the local, feeling not much of anything other than tired, The Gourds "Cracklins" shuffled on the iPod. Suddenly I felt better.
Hearing The Gourds is appropriate at my moment of transition since it was The Gourds, youthful and svelte, whom my girlfriend and I, newly relocated to the Emerald City, witnessed hauling instruments and amps into The Crocodile one late summer evening in 1994.
Looking at video of the band now (or within the last five years) it shows what 20 years can do to a person.
Nineteen-seventy was the high point of the Hippie revolution. Far enough away from the summer of love and the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) to allow for a good-sized "massification of bohemia" (Robert Christgau's phrase), 1970 was also the beginning of the end. The king and queen of the Hippies, Jimi and Janis, died in September and October, respectively. By the time Bill Graham films his vanity documentary, The Last Days of the Fillmore (1972), in the early summer of 1971, it is hard to imagine a more tired, rudderless group of shaggy-headed young people.
Anyhow, there is a huge Hippie push in 1969 and 1970. You can see it all over YouTube. Every Hippie band had a Hippie album in those years, or at least so it seems. It amazes me. I have become convinced over the last year of this "Hippies vs. Punks" project that the amount of music made then in those two years far exceeds what has been produced today in the last two years, even with all the ease that the digital revolution now affords us.
Nineteen-seventy was also a big protest year. A national student strike followed the May 4 Kent State shootings. It wasn't if the revolution was going to happen because the revolution was happening; it was when the government was going to collapse. While Nixon aide Chuck Colson hunkered down with the 82nd Airborne in the basement of the executive office building as 100,000 protesters converged on Washington D.C. on May 8, revolution was definitely something more than a stoned Hippie fantasy. The national student strike was real. In response to the national student strike Nixon approved the go-ahead of the Huston Plan, full implementation of which was blocked by J. Edgar Hoover. But Nixon kept a black ops group under the auspices of the White House. This is the Plumbers Unit of Watergate fame. And since Watergate is a cultural, political high-water mark in the United States, after which the neoliberal neoconservative counterrevolution begins, we must praise the Hippies for getting as close as they did to overturning the corrupt order of war and ill-gotten wealth; but we must also blame them for a great deal of naivete and showing no follow-through.
During this time, Zephyr, disappointed at how they had been treated by their recording company (Probe, a short-lived psychedelic, progressive rock specialty label of ABC Records), jumps ship to Warner Bros. Records. Here is how bass player and band leader David Givens describes the process in an excellent interview with Allan Vorda available on the Tommy Bolin Archives web site:
I met Jimmy Page in April 1970 when we shared the bill with Led Zeppelin at the Boston Tea Party in (oddly enough) Boston. They were in the middle of recording their second album for Atlantic, Led Zeppelin II. They were using Eddie Kramer as engineer/producer on some of the cuts and Page was really happy with his work. He recommended that I go see him in New York where he was supervising the construction of Hendrix’s new studio, Electric Lady, down in the Village on Eighth Street. Kramer, an expatriate South African, had worked with the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and all of Jimi Hendrix’s recordings as assistant engineer, engineer, or occasionally producer.
We were in New York a week later and Candy and I called Kramer and asked him if we could meet with him. I used Jimmy Page’s name and he said come on over. We found him in the midst of the construction mess, poking around looking for wires. He was very gracious and we made friends quickly. Kramer came to see us play when we got back to Boulder; we even had him come up and sit in with us. He liked what we were doing and decided he wanted to produce our next record. At that time, we still had a record deal with ABC/Probe and we were up for our next LP under our contract. The President of ABC Records, the parent of Probe called me and Candy into a meeting in L.A. where he told us that it had been decided to squash Probe and bring us onto the ABC label. He had Bill Szymczyk, who had just finished producing the soon to be released James Gang second LP, with him. He wanted Szymczyk to produce our next record. He played the as yet unreleased James Gang album for us. It sounded good (and was to make a star out of Joe Walsh), but we wanted Eddie Kramer. I told the President about Kramer and Szymczyk said that Kramer was “a hype” and that he took more credit than he deserved for Hendrix’s success. If it hadn’t been Jimmy Page who recommended Kramer, I probably wouldn’t have been stubborn about it, but I was. The ABC Pres was not a happy man. He said either we made the album with Syzmczyk or we were out. I said fine, get the release. Me and my big mouth.
I immediately called Eddie and told him what was happening. He said not to worry, he’d get us a deal with Reprise or Warner Brothers. He called the President of Reprise, Mo Ostin, and got us a deal over the phone. Barry [Fey] was a bit taken aback but went along; the rest of the band was very happy about this turn of events. Jimi Hendrix was the Master and to be working in his brand new, state-of-the-art studio was truly exciting. We’d all felt that our first album wasn’t up to the standard of our live performances at all, and it looked as though we had remedied all of the things that had held us up.
Givens was hopeful that the man who had a hand in creating the sainted Hendrix soundscapes would successfully midwife the improvisational magic of Zephyr onto a record. But like Bill Halverson, Eddie Kramer turned out to be another recording legend with feet of clay. Let's go back to Allan Vorda's interview with David Givens:
We had only two problems. We didn’t know it yet, but these two problems were going to thwart us again. Problem number one was Carly Simon. She was making her first album since her folk days and she was having Eddie produce it. She was a very smart girl, and she deduced, correctly, that if she struck up a romance with Eddie, she would receive priority treatment. She was ever so right: even though we had made a Top 30 album and she had no track record at all, she began getting the better time slots and more of it. Eddie is not the most macho of men and I suppose that fucking a big horse of a woman like Carly did something wonderful for his ego. At any rate, he was distracted by her and we suffered for it. He tried to be good, even had me play on a couple of her tunes, but he didn’t live up to his promises to us. It wasn’t all that bad, and we started out doing some good work. We’d been there for a couple of weeks when problem number two came up: Jimi Hendrix died. It was Sunday, and he had been expected to return to New York the next day to finish up his Cry of Love LP. He still had some vocals and some guitar work to finish and the final decision about which songs to include still had to be made. When he died, it fell to Mitch Mitchell and Eddie Kramer to mix the album and to try and make it sound finished. Hendrix did most of the mixing himself and Eddie and Mitch did not have his vision. After a day or two of really black mourning, the studio had to get back to work, but Eddie’s heart wasn’t really in it and he felt the weight of trying to complete Hendrix’s album. He and Jimi had been good friends, sharing a very successful endeavor and Eddie was feeling the loss. We were pushed aside right when we needed him to help us. The album suffered. I think there are great moments, but there’s some real junk on there that spoils it. On one of Tommy’s songs, Kramer was so preoccupied when he was editing it, that he inadvertently left in a whole duplicate chorus. Rather than pulling closer together and saving ourselves, we drew further apart. The last few weeks we spent on that album were torture. Mitch Mitchell and Eddie were having a very tough go of it and wanted as much time in the studio as possible. Eddie began forcing us to use the much smaller (though equally expensive) Studio B with various assistant (read: inexperienced) engineers as “producers.” We had to mix in Studio A, however, and mixing is an inexact sort of thing that can take more time than you might expect. Many times, Mitchell and various Hendrix hangers-on would be crowding into the control room toward the end of our allotted time. Many times Candy and I were furious, but there was nothing we could do — we had no way to force Kramer to live up to his commitment to us and he didn’t. We needed his direction and best efforts. We paid him for his direction and best efforts. He flaked out on us. After this album bombed, our confidence as a band diminished past the point of possible recovery. Time was running out for us.
Tommy and Bobby left in early 1971.
Going Back to Colorado is an easy listening, light rock album. There are some good tracks. I enjoy "Night Fades Softly," with its Pharoah Sanders vibe. But there is nothing revolutionary here. It is Hippie elevator music, a sound appropriate for the fern bar. It is not unpleasant; on the contrary, Going to Back Colorado is essentially pleasant. I can listen to this album repeatedly at low volume. And therein is the trapdoor for the Hippies. A song like "See My People Come Together" can be played as background music. The revolution can be not only televised but commodified.
We'll return to this issue of Hippie commodification and Electric Lady Studios in a future post. And we're not quite done with Zephyr. David and Candy Givens would go back to Colorado and put together another band after Tommy Bolin and Bobby Berge departed. Their final album of the Hippie era, Sunset Ride (1972), received favorable reviews; but due to some bad luck (a recurring theme for Zephyr), they were not able to parlay Sunset Ride into another recording contract. A final Zephyr post will tell the story of band's demise, which illuminates the difficulties the Hippies had in adapting to the 1980s.
The resumption of the Cold War that began in February with the fascist putsch of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has tossed me off my game here. Normally on Friday I post on "Hippies vs. Punks." That hasn't happened since Valentine's Day. Last we heard from "Hippies vs. Punks," the Boulder, CO band Zephyr had recorded their debut LP in Los Angeles, a remarkable album that was nonetheless botched by producer and recording legend Bill Halvorsen. In part two, we were going to explore the victimization of Zephyr by another record industry giant, producer Eddie Kramer. For more than a month then we have been suspended between the summer of 1969 and the late summer/early fall of 1970, when Zephyr's second album, Going Back to Colorado (1971), was recorded at Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios during the time of his death.
Another regular feature of this page that has been put on the back burner because of the new Cold War is the project of working through issues of the Marvel Comics Bronze Age reprint series, Where Monsters Dwell.
Currently we are at Where Monsters Dwell #17 (September 1972). A thoroughly unremarkable collection of four stories -- though Steve Ditko's "The World Beyond" (scans three and four below), which is reprinted from Strange Tales #82 (March 1961), is worth checking out; Ditko captures the last gasps of the early 1960s post-war High Modernism better than anyone -- Where Monsters Dwell #17 is noteworthy for a nice Gil Kane original cover; also, two of the four stories -- "If the Coat Fits" and "The Hidden Vampires," both reprinted from Journey Into Mystery #11 (August 1953) -- are examples of pre-Comics Code Authority Marvel horror.
Below are scans of the cover and all the splash pages (as well as one beautiful interior page from Ditko's "The World Beyond'). All the stories in Where Monsters Dwell #17, probably compiled by Editor-in-Chief Roy Thomas, deal with disappearance.
